[Sussex] A Vista of opportunity

[Desmond Armstrong]

I also perceive that the prospect of Vista will open up the opportunity 
to remove that awful system and to replace it with far better.
I have personnally been installing Linux on users home machines, and in 
their homes, for some years now. It does mean that I have to do a lot of 
work with them and do normally do the maintenance, but, the time that I 
spend with them is actually less than that previously required to 
maintain the other system.
For me Mandriva 2006 Full Version is superb and very complete in terms 
of hardware support.
Mandriva 2007 is too buggy and is not to be used at present. When I 
install I also do some additional updates including OpenOffice, now 
2.0.4 also Limewire, Google Earth and Picasa. One limitation is that we 
really do require broadband largely because software dial up modems are 
extremely difficult, and for the updates.

So what we require is people who are willing to do some of this work 
with very little reward.

The latest two machines that I have just resolved have been attacked by 
virus (not identified, probably self-destructed?) and the Windows XP was 
so destroyed that the normal restore from MS CD was not even possible. 
Both therefore required clean install.

However using Linux on a live CD I have demonstrated the power of Linux 
by recovering the users data and backing it up on external USB connected 
HD. Both these families are now convinced that Linux is the only way.